The Internet has rapidly and deeply involved in people's life since it was invented. In the early days the communication between any two network devices was accomplished through line transmission. In recent years, in order to meet the increasing demands of wireless information transmission, network devices equipped with wireless information transmission capability have been develop and introduced. These days on the Internet it is possible to communicate any two network devices through a wireless transmission means.
In the present wireless network environment, any two wireless network devices (such as a first wireless network device and a second wireless network device) may be located in different networks with different Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. It is difficult for the first wireless network device to change settings of the second wireless network device through a wireless transmission approach.
In general, if the first wireless network device has the IP address of the second wireless network device, it is possible for the first wireless network device to change the settings of the second wireless network device by means of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) through the network, or the first wireless network device may change its own IP address to become same as the second wireless network device. Then the first wireless network device can communicate with the second wireless network device through the broadcast method and do the setting for the second wireless network device. FIG. 1 shows a menu example of setting IP related information in a conventional Windows operating system (developed by Microsoft Co. of U.S.A.).
However, after the IP address of the first wireless network device has been altered, users have to restart the first wireless network device to make the new setting of the IP address effective. It is an annoyance to most users. In addition, users have to have some basic network knowledge to do the setting. In the event that the first wireless network device does not have the IP address of the second wireless network device, it is not possible to communicate with the second wireless network device through SNMP or broadcast.
Therefore it is important to provide a method for setting wireless network devices that employs a simple manual setting procedure to enable a first wireless network device to communicate with a second wireless network device even if the IP address of the second wireless network device is unknown at the first wireless network device.